You won’t find anybody playing CIA operative Brian Kelley in “Breach,” the upcoming espionage thriller “inspired by” the true story of Robert Hanssen, the FBI official caught spying for the Russians in 2001.

Although Kelley was at the center of the Hanssen case for almost two years, he doesn’t even have a bit role in “Breach,” which features a half-true Lois Lane-Jimmy Olsen duo pursuing Hanssen, a sexually twisted and ultra-religious operative who first volunteered to spy for the Russians in 1979.

Kelley’s story presented the producers with an inconvenient truth: His career, and nearly his life, was ruined by FBI agents who were certain he was the Russian mole, not Hanssen.

That’s nowhere in the movie, and it’s easy to understand why: The FBI’s investigation was “emotionally devastating to both him and his family,” Kelley’s lawyer said during the fight to salvage his sterling reputation.

The producers told Kelley they wanted to include him in their movie, according to a source involved in the conversations, but felt that doing so would “overshadow” the rest of the plot.

It sure would.

For 21 months beginning in 1999, the FBI pursued Kelley like a modern-day Inspector Javert, the rancorous detective of “Les Miserables.”

FBI agents followed Kelley around, tapped his phone, and eventually, stymied by a complete lack of evidence, even harassed Kelley’s ex-wife, children and parents with hissing, mistaken accusations that the man they loved was a Russian spy.

Why? Time and again, FBI officials have shown a stubborn resistance to accepting the idea that one of their own could go bad, a habit that surfaced again last summer in a Justice Department review of the FBI’s slow response to the discovery that two of its agents were sleeping with a Chinese spy.

In the Hanssen affair, they zeroed in on Kelley, who was one of a small circle of operatives and officials involved in a highly sensitive counterintelligence case involving a U.S. diplomat suspected of collaborating with the Russian KGB.

When the case leaked to Moscow, and then the news media, it was blown out of the water before the diplomat could be caught in the act and arrested.

Hanssen was the culprit, but the FBI was only looking outward. Indeed, in another part of the story you won’t see in the movie, the FBI even failed to revisit the warning of one of its own agents 10 years earlier that the lugubrious Hanssen, an ultra-conservative Catholic who dressed like an undertaker, might be spying for the Russians.

It was about the same time that the Bureau was ignoring a report from one of its agents in Phoenix that a lot of Arabs were taking flying lessons.

To the FBI, the culprit had to be somebody in the CIA. It couldn’t be one of their own.

“The agents in charge of the investigation reasoned that no one within the FBI would sell out the Bureau,” writes Bill Gertz in “Enemies,” a devastating compendium of FBI counterintelligence failures published last summer.

David Wise, the dean of Washington espionage specialists, reached the same conclusion in “Spy,” his 2002 book on the case.

“How could this have happened?” Wise wondered in the book. “Partly it was bureaucratic blinders, the FBI’s ingrained belief that the mole was more likely to be a CIA officer than one of its own.”

“The investigation ruined Kelley’s career at CIA,” writes Gertz, a Washington Times reporter, “as the FBI continually told CIA bureaucrats that the case against Kelley was 100-percent solid.”

George J. Tenet, in another act of ignominy in his tenure as CIA director, failed to step forward and defend Kelley

But you won’t find any of that in “Breach,” which, by the looks of the previews, is a heart-thumping thriller with FBI supersleuths cornering the evil genius.

The thugs who pursued the wrong man for more than four years aren’t to be found in this airbrushed version of history.

To this day, the FBI has never apologized to Kelley for turning his life into a living nightmare, even after the Justice Department’s inspector general brought the ugly details to light in a 2003 report that left no doubt whatsoever about the travesty.

Even though he was absolved, Kelley’s career was in tatters. In 2001 he was transferred out of undercover operations to a desk in the spokesman’s office at the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX), an obscure, toothless agency in the vast U.S. intelligence community.

His last day of government service is Jan. 31, a 42-year-long career that is ending with only the wind at his back — and a strong motivation to write his own version of the affair, which has still not been fully revealed.

In the end, the FBI did conduct some dazzling counterintelligence work to nail Hanssen, who had near-complete access to the FBI’s computerized counterintelligence files. Thus, he would get early warning if U.S. moles in Moscow had gotten a whiff of his treachery.

He handed over their names to the Russians, who promptly executed them.

So it was quite a coup for the FBI to get him, a triumph lavishly celebrated in “Breach.”

Meanwhile, like a personality erased from official pictures in the old Soviet Union, Kelley’s role in the affair has been swept aside.

It makes you wonder if “inspired by a true story” has any meaning at all.

Hanssen was obsessed by the real-life double agent Kim Philby, a high-ranking British intelligence official who spied for the Russians from the 1930s until he was forced to resign under suspicion in 1951. He fled to Moscow a few years later.

A character based on Philby shows up in another current espionage thriller, “The Good Shepherd,” an account of the CIA’s early days.

The movie’s central character is Edward Wilson, a stoic espio-bureaucrat supposedly modeled on the legendary CIA counterspy James Jesus Angleton, played by Matt Damon.

Let me tell you, I knew James Angleton, and Matt Damon is no James Angleton.

I met Angleton on a hot summer day in 1978, when he arranged for me to interview him in the august Army-Navy Club at Farragut Square Park, a few blocks from the White House.

He was in disgrace then, cast out of the CIA following revelations that he’d been running a “massive” mail opening and counterintelligence program against American citizens, all firmly prohibited by the law that established the CIA in 1947.

But the real reason Angleton was dumped was that his paranoia about Russian moles had tied the CIA in knots, ruining careers and effectively shutting down its spying operations against the Russians.

To Angleton, any Russian who agreed to spy for the U.S. had to be a KGB plant. Anyone who disagreed was investigated and cashiered.

None of this is in “The Good Shepherd,” which ends in the mid-1960s, before Angleton’s descent into a peculiar kind of madness.

Matt Damon has all his marbles at the movie’s end. He’s a tough but sensitive guy who did what had to be done, including the murder of his son’s fiancee and driving a legitimate Russian defector to suicide with an injection of LSD.

We like that, the movie seems to say.

When I met Angleton, he was full of self-dramatization and reeling with imagined plots, nothing like Matt Damon.

Sucking on Virginia Slims and sipping a glass of Galliano and soda, Angleton prattled on about Sino-Soviet deception operations and KGB agents in Congress, weaving a particularly bizarre and odious theory about Sen. Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who conducted hearings on the CIA’s assassination plots against foreign leaders.

The U.S.-backed government in South Vietnam, thoroughly laced with communist spies, had not long ago collapsed. Thousands of “boat people” were at sea, trying to escape.

I asked Angleton what he, as counterintelligence chief, had done to try and root out Hanoi’s agents during the war.

He waved me off like a fly.

“Vietnam wasn’t important.” All he cared about was the KGB.

The next day, Angleton took me to his Arlington house. He showed off his prized orchids and shelves full of books on trout fishing — “they hide in the shadows, you know”—and provided colorful details about himself that were long famous.

It was as if he were auditioning to play himself in a movie.

Too bad he didn’t. The real story of Angleton, driven crazy by phantom spies, would have been more compelling, with the added virtue of being true.

So, too, the real story of Hanssen and Brian Kelley.

Neither of them, of course, has a happy ending.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.